Google Maps: how can I get the exact date of a Google review for a business I don't own?

user_6095 0
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I'd like to explore patterns of Google reviews for a specific business (that I do not own). It would be useful to get the exact date of a review, rather than just the "3 months ago" or "1 year ago" approximation that you get via the web interface.

Does anyone know a way to do this? Here are the options I've explored so far:

  • I tried "manually" scraping the review list HTML (e.g. from a page like this), but it does not contain any review timestamp that I could recognise, other than the approximated relative date (e.g. "1 year ago").
  • The Google "My Business" API does seem to provide exact review dates, but to use this API, you need to own the business for which you're retrieving the reviews.
  • The Google Places API does expose review dates, but only for 5 reviews per place. According to this API feature request, this limitation remains in place even if you pay for Premium data access.
  • Results from party review analysis tool Reviewshake contain an absolute date field, but it is derived from the approximate relative date. So it erroneously makes it seem like most past reviews occurred exactly on this day each month, or exactly on this day on previous years!

Any help much appreciated!

web-scraping google-api google-maps
1 Answers

The unix timestamp you're referring to can be easily converted from you first bullet point; what occurs when you view the reviews is Google's ReviewService is polled and the date comes in a unix format, that unix format is processed by a date/time function in the JS file on maps that returns the duration in length resulting in a week ago, a month ago, etc.

There is no known interface other than some of what you've already looked at; the closest you've got in your first point is the direct maps URL however you would need to rip the JS feed and convert the timestamps where you can make sense of them.

There aren't many sources that can do this but I can recommend you try https://www.reviewsmaker.com/api/demo/google/ or sign up free at reviewsmaker.com and add the business as a listing and you'll be able to crawl the results; otherwise you'll be stuck scraping the same data.

If you find another way please do share your results!

user_95256570
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